Finally: a body
ishoo
that can't be blamed on fashion. Amidst the furore about toxic implants comes a surprising statistic from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (no more jokes about that BAAPS acronym please). 9,400 British women underwent operations to augment their boobs last year, to which the rational response is, why so few? In Venezuela an estimated 35,000-40,000 have them every year.

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Idealised images of hourglass women have been blasted at us since Reubens. In the 1950s, the biggest movie stars in the world looked like bosomy, blow-up dolls compared with today's wispy cigarette placebos. Top models however, have, apart from a few notable exceptions, never been pneumatically dramatic. That's because more than concupiscence or conventional prettiness, more even than youth, catwalk fashion favours an elegant, etiolated line. Being mainly spherical - at least they were the last time I looked, although with today's cut-price surgery you never know -boobs are not compatible with lines of any sort. From Twiggy to Kate Moss, flat has been where it's at. Look at Prada. Regardez Armani. Big bazookas there are none. The front row might indulge in subtle (and not so) doses of Botox and fillers. But when it comes to breast enlargements it prefers to hypothecate its budget elsewhere - probably on a bag enlargement. Boob jobs may have become upward mobile, socially speaking, but starlets perching on the front row, inflated breasts winched into swooping décolletés, still look as physically out of place as bawdy barmaids at a eunuch convention. All who enter the kingdom of fashion understand this sooner or later, which is why the last time you saw Victoria Beckham's enhanced orbs on prominent display was before she launched her classy clothing line. The moment she decided to become a Serious Designer, the boobs had to be put on a leash.

Inevitably there has been some capitulation in high fashion to the buffet of surgery now available. In the early 90s, the rise of drag queen culture, ostensibly a joyous liberation, began to exert a not entirely positive influence on mainstream fashion. Then, in the early noughties, a naughty school-girl reflex, combined with fashion's natural impulse to colonise the ugly, the tacky and the scary meant that an influential group of stylists and photographers, including Terry Richardson and, to a point, Carine Roitveld started exploring some of the conventions of pornography. Porn-chic was born - can't you just hear Diana Vreeland's bangles and cuffs rattling as she ricochets around her grave? While much of the stuff in the glossy fashion magazines was meant to be tongue in cheek or, that other get out of jail free card, thought-provoking, the satire sailed high over the hair extensions of that growing legion of followers who interpret every last bit of mischief making in fashion as a literal commandment. Thou shalt be as thin as a wire coat hanger, with the breasts of a teenage boy's Baccardi fuelled fantasies, even though thin and bosomy is like asking for desert and pasture on the same farm. And while thou art at it, thou shalt teeter around in hooker heels with Rapunzal hair down to your waist.

Haute fashion treated porn like an amusing feral creature in a petting zoo and eventually the feral creature bit it in the padded and uplifted rear. Yet even though a few catwalk models have had discreet implants (unthinkable a decade ago) for the most part, fashion treats body parts like expendable accessories - one season breasts are in, the next it's bums - it tends to cater to these requirements with scissors (tailoring, padding and, this year, peplums) rather than the knife..

If you were fortunate enough to spend your formative years in Britain in the 70s and 80s, an era which we can now see was a blissful sliver of history: post corset and the broken doll aesthetics of the 60s but not yet manacled to the current obsessions of unyielding muscle tone, ageless ageing and eternal skinniness, then you may well sail into your dotage not caring about wrinkles, sags and less than pneumatic breasts - or at least not caring enough to jeopardise your health and finances by doing anything serious to arrest them.

But if you're growing up surrounded by images of human Barbies; if you're a woman making a living on television or, increasingly, any area of public domain, it's not so easy to remain impervious to the new expectations, however unrealistic.…Still 9,400 women is hardly an epidemic, even if the numbers are growing each year (an estimated 20,000 Brits travel abroad for work of some kind or other, lipo usually, or face lifts). Some of the increase may be down to repeat custom. Danielle Lloyd, the Wag accused of racist bullying on Celebrity Big Brother, has just announced with impeccable timing, that she's going in for a celebratory second, post-baby boob job.

Sophisticated women may roll their eyes at Lloyd's antiques, and then find themselves sneaking a look at their own body in the mirror. Self-esteem, that most fragile of human glands, in the name of which so much "self-improvement" is carried out, can be as elastic as a wag's skin. It starts out requiring only a decent hair-cut and the occasional new outfit to keep it feeling chipper, and progresses to demanding a complete body transplant. But only in some cases. Aren't we lucky we're British?